Forecasting Inflation Rate by Star Model: An Indian Experience
In this empirical study, an attempt has been made to model non-linear dynamics of inflation rate in India through Smooth Transition ⁄ Threshold Auto-Regression (STAR). Inflation is measured based on weekly data on Wholesale Price Index (WPI) fur a period of seven years from the week ended April 2, 1994 to the week ended March 31, 2001. The log(WPI) series is detected to be a Difference-Stationary process, indicating that the series is non-stationary but its first-order difference is stationary. The generating process of the transformed-stationary series is identified to be non-linear. Six variants of STAR model are estimated for transformed-stationary series and are used to forecast WPI and annual inflation rate. Empirical assessment of out-of-sample forecast errors eveals that estimated STAR models perform reasonably well in generating short-run forecasts of both the variables.